Oracle Blog

"That which does not Kill you Makes you Stronger"

Wednesday Mar 28, 2007

Most people have had the experience of moving into a home or apartment that was previously occupied and wondering, as one gets familiar with the new digs, "Why did they paint it that color"? or "Whoever thought that this linoleum/tile/carpet was a good idea...what were they thinking!?"....

Something similar happens when you move into a new organization, with the difference being that if you keep your mouth shut long enough (not easy for me!) you will find that not only are there very good reasons for doing things a certain way, but also that there are a lot of very good things going on that you need to appreciate and encourage.

So, some of the great things I have found recently in my new organization:

StarOffice 8 supports ODF - Open Document Format. Important because ODF is a true open standard, and has been adopted and implemented by IBM, Sun, Google, Red Hat and even Microsoft. It matters because ODF allows you to create documents whose formatting is independent of the application used to actually do the creation. Guarantees availability of the content well into the future. StarOffice 8 also works with the Sun Weblog Publisher, a terrific blogging tool!

Communications Products - A great team of people and what amazing IP. Turns out that one of the inventors of MIME, Ned Freed, works for Sun. He's currently doing some really cool stuff with MTA (Mail Transport Agent).

network.com "The data center on demand". Also known as the Sun Grid Compute Utility, network.com's release 1.1 is out with lots of new features and new ISVs. We have already committed 20 new user applications to open source with hundreds more to go. Go to network.com/application to see the on line applications available and to sign up. In a few months they will be releasing the ability to access network.com with an API and also to allow you to open network connection to other sites to read, collect, write and store data.

All this, still for only $1/CPU/hour. Great for developers looking for a cost-effective way of testing
their code across a large number of machines.

ISV-Engineering This worldwide engineering team has a simple mission: MAKE APPLICATIONS RUN best on Solaris! Recent successes include integration of Cisco's Secure Access
Control Server with
Sun's Identity Manager. The integration of network access control and identity management gives the enterprise the ability for a truly centralized secure system.

The result; per Symantec, Sun's T1000 "Niagara" platform is now the preferred platform for deploying
Brightmail. Price to
performance and power utilization can't be beat! A rack of T1000's can
process over one billion messages per week and can support a million
mailboxes. When Brightmail is used with Sun's Java Messaging Server and
Storage, it is a complete email solution!

And check out the latest on the Detroit Red Wings - my favorite hockey team. The latest news is in the right nav bar over here....